A Perfect Proposal (43 page)

‘What do you mean?’

Sophie looked out of the window. If Luke didn’t suspect that his grandmother wanted him and Sophie to be together, she wasn’t going to mention it, and she was probably wrong anyway. ‘Oh, I don’t know. You don’t mind that she bought the house?’

He shook his head. ‘I did think it was foolish and whimsical at first but her heart was set on it.’

‘But why involve us?’ She wanted to say ‘me’ but didn’t want to make it too personal.

He shrugged. ‘She needs us to tell the designer and the builders, if necessary, what we think should be done with the house.’

‘But we don’t know what she wants the house for, do we? Has she told you?’

‘No. She said we were to look at it and think how best it could be used.’

‘It could be converted into holiday flats,’ said Sophie, hating the idea. ‘That would make the most money, I should think.’

‘I don’t think my grandmother is interested in making money out of it.’

‘Oh. So what does she want done with it, do you think? It’s a pity she can’t come over herself and see it. I mean, what is the point in buying it if she doesn’t come and see it? It’s crazy.’

‘Well, at last we agree on something.’

A couple of young men were mixing cement. The machine was whirling away, fuelled by the generator. Sophie was terribly grateful she had seen it in silence, in the beauty of the morning.

‘They seem to be doing a great job!’ said Luke over the noise of the machinery.

‘They’ve replaced the roof, quite a lot of the woodwork and the floors,’ she shouted back. ‘Let’s go inside.’

They said hello to the builders and explained who they were, and then went inside, where it was quiet. Sunshine poured in through the big windows. They walked through the house in silence, taking in the space.

The old kitchen had high windows you couldn’t see out of, a huge range and a built-in dresser.

‘I can’t decide if I like this kitchen or not,’ said Sophie. ‘I do love the period features but it’s not very cosy, is it?’

‘Does it need to be cosy?’ asked Luke, inspecting the bell indicator above the door.

‘Oh yes. Kitchens have to be cosy. Think of Moira’s.’

‘But only if this was a family home,’ said Luke.

‘Yes.’ The thought of this house being converted into flats was suddenly depressing. It should be full of children, running through it, making a noise and banging into chairs. ‘I wonder if they’d let you lower the windowsills, and maybe put on a sunroom. Then you could have a huge, live-in kitchen with an open fire and a sofa. I’ve always wanted a kitchen with an open fire and a sofa.’

‘Have you?’

The bleakness Sophie was aware of when she first saw Luke seemed more pronounced. She so wanted to make him smile, make him happy, she almost ran to him so she could hug him. But whilst they were conversing quite easily there was still an air of formality between them. He was so polite.

Fortunately her sense of self-preservation made her prattle instead. ‘Oh yes! Think of being curled up on a sofa by the fire – or a woodburner – while someone else is cooking, chatting away. And if it was a sunroom as well, that would be bliss. You could have big double doors that you’d open in summer. You could have some solar heating panels.’

‘You seem to have very definite ideas,’ said Luke. ‘I thought you didn’t know what the house needed.’

‘Oh, I know what I’d like if it was my house, but it isn’t. It’s Matilda’s.’ Her joy in her daydream faded along with it. Her mind was no longer full of chubby, barefoot children running in from the garden to show her something as she made nourishing soup, and she was back to being the girl who was never going to be part of Matilda’s family.

‘Shall we look upstairs?’ said Luke.

There were five big bedrooms on the first floor. A family bathroom still had an exceptionally long bath in it, with claw feet. There was a lavatory with a wooden seat and an overhead flush.

‘So is that period detail or something you’d change?’ asked Luke.

‘I’m not sure. It’s fun but, like the kitchen, not exactly cosy. Although of course you could fit a lot of children in that bath.’

‘Would you like to have a lot of children, Sophie?’

Something about the way he said her name made her want to weep. For the first time there was a gentleness to his tone, a flicker of warmth, but perhaps she had imagined it. ‘Yes,’ she said huskily. ‘Let’s go up to the attic. I want to find the bedroom Matilda slept in when she was little. And I want to see if you can see the sea.’

They found what must have been the room. It hadn’t been touched. There was a narrow metal bed, a rag rug on the floor and a blanket box. Sophie went straight to the window.

‘Look! The sea!’

Luke came up behind her. She could hear his breathing, smell his cologne. It was only too easy to imagine leaning back against him. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘There’s the sea.’

They stayed looking at the view for a few moments and then it became too much for Sophie. If he wasn’t hers, she didn’t want to be near him. He didn’t seem the same Luke now. He was so cut off, reserved, it was as if he didn’t have
feelings any more. Or if he had them, no one but he was going to know about them.

‘Let’s see what there is in the other attic room. The builders don’t seem to have been up here at all.’

‘Oh, there’s a double bed in here, and a mattress,’ she said. ‘No priceless antiques though.’ She went to the window and looked out to see if the view was different.

Just then a car drew up.

‘I think the designer is here.’

‘I’ll go down and let her in,’ said Luke.

Sophie stood looking down as Becky parked her car and Luke greeted her, and then she went down a flight of stairs to the first floor so she could get a quick look at the master bedroom. She was just turning away so she could join them downstairs when a huge black car came through the gate.

She watched, transfixed, as Luke and Becky turned to see it. It pulled up and a woman got out of the back seat and then waited as an elderly lady got out.

‘Matilda!’ said Sophie and started to head for the stairs. Then she hesitated. Let Luke greet Matilda first, let him introduce her to Becky.

She watched Luke cross to his grandmother in two strides. He lifted her off her feet to hug her before gently setting her down again.

Sophie couldn’t hear what was said but there was laughter and then silence as Matilda stood and looked at the house she’d been searching for so long.

After a few moments Sophie could bear the suspense no longer. She had to find out what Matilda thought. She took a last look out of the window and suddenly noticed that the creeper was just coming into flower. It was a wisteria.

‘Sophie! Honey! How lovely to see you! You look – well!’

Sophie hugged Matilda almost as hard as Luke had done. ‘Matilda! Why didn’t you say you were coming?’

‘Well, to be honest, I didn’t know myself. Then I thought of you being here, and Luke being here, looking at my house together, and I thought: Why aren’t I there too? So I arranged for April and me to come over. I just thought we should all be together at this time.’

Sophie wanted to ask ‘What time?’ as there seemed nothing special to celebrate but didn’t. Matilda was quite elderly and had just endured an Atlantic crossing. Instead she said, ‘I’m sure you came first class and have been chauffeur-driven but it’s still some journey! Was the traffic awful from London?’

Matilda shook her head, ever so slightly pitying. ‘No, dear, we just came from the airport. Only about forty minutes or so.’

‘Granny came from Newquay,’ Luke explained. ‘Private jet.’

‘Oh.’ Sophie had assumed she’d got used to being around rich people but the thought of taking a private jet across the Atlantic just seemed like a fantasy, or a film.

‘And April looked after me,’ said Matilda. ‘April? Come and meet Sophie.’

April appeared. She was a pleasant, middle-aged woman who seemed a little surprised to find herself in Cornwall
surrounded by strange people. ‘If you don’t mind,’ she said, having greeted everyone politely, ‘I’ll go and sit in the car and rest. I don’t sleep well on planes.’

‘So how did you find the house?’ asked Sophie, remembering how difficult it had been for her and Luke to track it down.

‘Our driver put in the postcode and brought us straight here,’ said Matilda.

Of course he did. What a boringly practical answer.

‘It seems funny – and sort of wrong – for the house to have a postcode,’ said Sophie, to herself, really.

‘I know,’ said Luke, to Sophie’s surprise. ‘It seems too modern a concept for this place.’

Just for a moment their eyes met and Sophie wondered if the house meant as much to him as it did to her. But it didn’t seem possible – not the Luke he was now. Before he’d been whisked back into the real world by Ali, she would have believed that, but things had changed. She knew where he really belonged.

‘Now, let me see the house,’ said Matilda. ‘Becky and Sophie, come with me.’ She hooked her arm through Sophie’s and seemed to sink into reminiscence. ‘I’m not sure how old I was when I first came here, but we were collected from the station in a horse and trap. I do remember that. The horse was a giant! He probably was pretty big, but to me, about two feet tall, well, I barely came up to his knee. It took a long time to get here from the station and when we’d gone through the ford my grandmother – I think it was my grandmother – one of the two old ladies, anyway, said: “Not long to go now.” I slept in that little room … Hey! I have my camera! I promised them back home that I’d take pictures.’

Matilda wandered from room to room finding a memory in each one and taking photos. Becky and Luke went with her up to her little bedroom, but Sophie stayed behind. The stairs
were too narrow and the space too small for everyone. Thinking that Matilda would be getting tired, she gathered together the chairs that the builders used for their breaks and arranged them in the sitting room, where it was sunny. The wind was getting up a bit and she didn’t want Matilda getting cold. She wished they had a flask or something, so Matilda could have a drink.

But Matilda still seemed full of energy when she led the others to where Sophie had arranged the chairs. ‘My little room is just the same! The bed, the blanket box and the rag rug. All those years!’ She frowned. ‘It may not be the same rag rug, of course, but it’s very like it.’

‘That’s amazing,’ said Sophie. ‘Now why don’t you have a bit of a rest?’

Although she seemed to have coped with the journey amazingly well Matilda obligingly sat down and so did everyone else.

‘So, Becky, honey, what are your thoughts?’ she asked when they were all seated.

‘The thing is, Mrs Winchester,’ said Becky, ‘unless I know what you want to do with the house, I really can’t help. Is it going to be a family home? Are you going to rent it out? Or you could divide it into holiday flats?’

‘Let’s think of it as a family holiday home,’ said Matilda, having glanced at Sophie and Luke. She might have been seeking an opinion, but she didn’t get one.

‘OK,’ said Becky. ‘Let’s think of the big picture. What room is the most important?’

‘The kitchen,’ said Sophie, forgetting it wasn’t really her business. ‘And currently, I don’t like it.’

‘It’s very traditional. Change it and you might lose period features,’ said Becky. ‘Fortunately it’s not listed so you can do what you like, but you should think of the integrity of the building.’

‘You can’t see out of the windows,’ said Sophie. ‘It reminds me of old schools where the windows are high to let in light but you can’t see out. I expect they were like that here for the same reason, so the skivvies could go on skivvying without distraction.’

‘Oh!’ said Becky, who seemed surprised Sophie was so vehement.

Sophie was a bit surprised too. ‘But if you put a big conservatory on the side of the house and took out that wall, you could have the fireplace, sunshine and loads of space.’

‘It is an outside wall,’ said Becky, making notes, ‘but we could put in a steel or something to prop it up. It would be expensive though,’ she added.

‘Let’s not worry about cost now,’ said Matilda.